Book Review:

MEXICO UNCONQUERED
Chronicles of Power and Revolt
by John Gibler
City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2009

WOBBLIES AND ZAPATISTAS
Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History
by Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic
PM Press, Oakland, 2008

by Bill Weinberg, WIN Magazine

It is welcome to see two new entries at the bookstore on the Zapatistas and related revolutionary movements in Mexico—issues that have slipped from the U.S. headlines even as nightmarish violence escalates with vertiginous rapidity just across the border. Both these books also have something to add to the long debate about armed struggle and how it relates to unarmed, civil popular movements.

John Gibler's Mexico Unconquered is most useful in its first-hand reportage from across a swath of social struggles. Gilber speaks with peasants in impoverished villages of Guerrero and Michoacán, where residents are terrorized by security forces acting under the rubric of drug enforcement. From the U.S. border, he offers a chilling interview with a pollero who smuggles desperate migrants across the line—proffering a perilous desert journey for an exorbitant price. He portrays a lawless society in which the poor are left with the choices of submitting to hunger and humiliation, heading north—or fighting back.

Gibler visits the Zapatista rebel zones in the jungle canyons of Chiapas, where Maya peasants have for 15 years been constructing their own living model of indigenous autonomy—an armed movement which has managed to survive and maintain its turf through political rather than military means.

Two civil movements Gibler focuses on are those at the village of Atenco in central Mexico, which was brutally occupied by police following protests in 2006, and in the southern state of Oaxaca, which saw a popular uprising against a corrupt governor that same year. The Oaxaca movement included marches and sit-ins, but also "throwing rocks at the riot police [and] burning tires at the barricades."

Gibler's most important contribution is his prison interview with Gloria Arenas—"Colonel Aurora" of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI). Arenas was arrested in 1999, along with her husband Jacobo Silva Nogales, "Comandante Antonio," charged with leading the guerilla movement in the mountains of Guerrero. She tells how she was politicized in her youth in the Sierra Zongolica of Veracruz, where campesinos faced repression for organizing to defend their lands from rapacious logging operations. The 1998 massacre at Guerrero's El Charco village—where soldiers killed several ERPI militants and civilian sympathizers in a surprise attack on a schoolhouse—is related. And new light is shed on the ERPI's emergence from the more Leninist and doctrinaire Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR).

Arenas cites the Zapatistas' ethic of mandar obedeciendo (command by obeying) as offering a more democratic alternative, in which decision-making power flows up from the base rather then being imposed from above. She also speaks of armed struggle as part of a praxis with civil social movements, resorted to "depending on the circumstances, but not defined by dogma independently of experience." (True to form, the EPR issued orders for Comandante Anotnio's death when he broke away to form the ERPI.)

More theoretical and frankly meandering is Wobblies & Zapatistas, a series of interviews between anarchist scholar Andrej Grubacic and the revered radical historian, conscientious objector and veteran anti-war and civil rights activist Staughton Lynd. The conversation starts out with the Chiapas rebellion and the Industrial Workers of the World—"the Zapatistas of yesteryear," in Lynd's phrase—but makes brief stops with the community organizing efforts of former steelworkers in post-industrial Youngstown, the 1946 general strike in Oakland, the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, and the 1980s revolutionary upsurges of Central America. Lynd ties it all together with his concept of "accompaniment"—basically, throwing one's lot in with the oppressed, sharing the burdens and risks of their struggles.

Grubacic and Lynd are concerned with the potentialities of movements that seek fundamental social change "without taking over the state," drawing from both a Marxist analysis of capitalism's dynamics and an anarchist critique of centralized power. While they are clearly inspired by the Zapatistas, Lynd acknowledges that the Chiapas revolutionaries have fallen short of their ambitions to build a unified movement across Mexico. He also concedes that their intransigent opposition to traditional political parties (even of the left) has been criticized by some Mexican activists and commentators as counter-productive—helping to bring the right to power.

Lynd brings a similarly nuanced analysis to the question of nonviolence, speaking of his personal commitment to the principle and how it developed in the ant-war movement of the 1960s, how he perceives its applicability to many of the struggles discussed—yet without portraying it as an absolute or uniform solution.

Grubacic is from the former Yugoslavia, and inevitably this discussion touches on the question of so-called "humanitarian intervention"—unfortunately occasioning the book's one failure of intellectual honesty. The wording of Grubacic's question is contemptuously dismissive of those who are concerned about Darfur and Tibet, or were concerned about Kosova ten years ago. And Lynd's answer is just as bad, summing up U.S. war aims in the Balkans as "to destroy the last vestiges of public ownership in Serbia," without even mentioning the ethnic cleansing. There may be a case to be made that U.S. war aims were those he depicts, and there is certainly a good case against "humanitarian intervention" as counter-productive hubris. But failure to even acknowledge the atrocities is simply dodging the question. One would hope for words that would encourage solidarity between the Zapatistas and the Bosnians, Kosovars or Tibetans—rather than a glib betrayal of the latter.

Lynd is more honest on the limitations and complexities of nonviolence when he looks into American history. He acknowledges the critical role of the abolitionists—"the strongest nonviolent movement in United States history," at least up to that point. But he also acknowledges that it was the Union army and its merciless war that ultimately destroyed the slave system. "Could slavery have been ended in any other way?" he asks. "Was this humanitarian intervention justified? I do not know the answer."

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Bill Weinberg is author of Homage to Chiapas: the New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso 2000) and editor of the online World War 4 Report.

This review first appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of WIN Magazine, journal of the War Resisters League.

See also:

CHIAPAS: PORTRAIT OF THE RESISTANCE
Autonomy Under Siege in the Zapatista Zones
by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, CIP Americas Program/La Jornada
World War 4 Report, February 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution